Adaptive Stiffness Structures for Air Vehicle Drag Reduction
Abstract
The development of several adaptive internal structures concepts is described that are aimed towards enabling adaptive static aeroelastic shape control of an aircraft wing in flight. It is shown how changes in the position, orientation and stiffness of the internal wing structure can be used to change the bending and torsion stiffness properties of a wing, and hence the control of the aerodynamic performance, in particular the lift and drag characteristics. Two approaches that implement the adaptive internal structures technology are described, based upon the rotation and chordwise translation of the spars. Following the description of conceptual studies to illustrate the concepts, the design, manufacture and testing of two wind tunnel models is described. The experimental results were found to show good agreement with static and dynamic aeroelastic behaviour predictions from Finite Element models. The feasibility of implementing the adaptive internal structures approach on full-size aircraft is discussed.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2006
- Accession Number
- ADA479831
Entities
People
- J. E. Cooper
Organizations
- University of Manchester